Posts Tagged ‘Amtrak’
Just 363 Shopping Days Till Christmas Links
* Call for Papers: Literature and Extraction. Call for Papers: The Romantic Fantastic.
* A new Black Mirror is dropping tomorrow. From doing some recent workshops with Black Mirror as a focus I think it’s clear that an occasional surprise release is a much better model for them than the binge.
* Blast-Door Art: Cave Paintings of Nuclear Era.
* Sure, when you put it that way it sounds really bad.
* The global economy should isolate Japan by any means necessary until it reverses this decision.
* When Report Cards Go Out on Fridays, Child Abuse Increases on Saturdays, Study Finds.
* This is one version of strategic inefficiency: how some are relieved from doing the work that would slow their progression. And, of course, others then inherit that work. That some people end up being given more administrative work because they are more efficient might seem so obvious that it does not need to be said. The obvious is not always obvious to those who benefit from a system; the obvious always needs to be said. We need to learn from how inefficiency is rewarded and how that rewarding is a mechanism for reproducing hierarchies: it is about who does what; about who is saved from doing what. In academic career terms, efficiency can be understood as a penalty: you are slowed down by what you are asked to pick up.
* How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. A helpful Twitter thread elaborates on just how much of the internet economy is predicated on fraud of one type or another.
* U.S. Grip on the Market for Higher Education Is Slipping.
* The Southwest May Be Deep Into a Climate-Changed Mega-Drought. Discovery of recent Antarctic ice sheet collapse raises fears of a new global flood. Melting Arctic ice is now pouring 14,000 tons of water per second into the ocean, scientists find. 2018 was the 4th warmest year in recorded history. “The last five years have been the five warmest years in modern human history … The last cooler-than-normal year, based on the 20th century average, was way back in 1976.” Rising Waters Are Drowning Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Risks of ‘domino effect’ of tipping points greater than thought, study says. ‘We are at war’: New York’s rat crisis made worse by climate change. ‘Future-proofing’ is how you say climate change in Texas. 130,000. The Real-Life Effects of Trump’s Environmental Rollbacks: 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation. Democrats remain fundamentally unserious.
* Moving a section of railroad up and inland is not going to be the drastic logistical challenge of the 21st century. It is going to be an ordinary baseline necessity, one minor component in a comprehensive retooling of life and infrastructure. Whole cities will have to move up and in. Rail and transit, water and sewer, power and industry—none of it can stay put on the low ground. Nor, if there’s any hope of getting emissions under control, is the feeble, endangered Amtrak line more than a fraction of the transportation systems the country will need for its survival. The issue isn’t whether we can mobilize to keep rail service running through Wilmington without interruption. It’s whether there’s going to be a Wilmington at all.
* Here are the yoga pants you should buy if you don’t want to poison the groundwater.
* Fifty years since Earthrise.
* Migrant boy dies in U.S. custody; Trump vows shutdown will last until border wall is funded. A 5-Month-Old Girl Has Been Hospitalized With Pneumonia After Being Detained By The Border Patrol. Border Patrol says young girl in custody nearly died after going into cardiac arrest: report. ICE Quietly Drops 200 Asylum Seekers at El Paso Bus Station with No Money or Shelter Right Before Christmas. ICE Is Using Driver’s License Applications to Arrest Immigrants. ICE, CBP Seize Billions In Assets Including Human Remains.
* A College Student Was Told To Remove A “Fuck Nazis” Sign Because It Wasn’t “Inclusive.”
* The fact that there can be no accountability despite “serious” allegations is, in some sense, the common theme of the time. It’s part of a drumbeat that insists: We cannot indict a sitting president; we cannot discipline a sitting justice. If you are untruthful for a long enough period of time, you can find your way into a job where there are no consequences for being untruthful.
* How Mark Burnett Invented Trump.
* The Catholic Church in Illinois withheld the names of at least 500 priests accused of sexual abuse of minors, the state’s attorney general said. Wild that the Catholic Church would think it could win a morality fight about kids and sex.
* Elon Musk is a ludicrous, transparent fraud, and it just doesn’t matter a bit.
* After McDonogh 35 vote, New Orleans will be 1st in US without traditionally run public schools.
* You can’t argue with facts! Milwaukee named one of the best places to start a business in the US.
* Why did the Times let Alice Walker recommend an anti-Semitic book?
* What if the Constitution is bad?
* Putting your mass shooting on credit.
* What Minimum-Wage Foes Got Wrong About Seattle. Everything! And they were wrong about unions too!
* A Mysterious Object Twice the Size of Earth is What Caused Uranus’ Lopsided Orbit.
* Julie Rea was convicted of killing her son largely on the testimony of bloodstain-pattern analysts. She was later acquitted and exonerated, joining a growing community of Americans wrongly convicted with bad science.
* The Spider-Verse story that (kind of) inspired Into the Spider-Verse is only $8.99 at Comixology. It’s fun!
* How the ‘Spider-Verse’ Animators Created That Trippy Look.
* Berlin Is a Masterpiece of a Graphic Novel.
* One second from every episode of Mad Men.
* Great session today, doc, thanks.
* The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting.
* Childhood poverty has a lasting impact on developing brain, finds study.
* I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon.
* Your Vagina Is Terrific (and Everyone Else’s Opinions Still Are Not).
* For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain. Stay tuned for my darkly erotic sequel to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Sunday Links!
* The science fictional sublime: the art of Penguin science fiction.
* From the syllabus of my wonderful Cultural Preservation class: “Can Auschwitz Be Saved?” and “The Myth of the Vanquished: The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.”
* Great moments in the law school scam. Wow.
* Fraternity expels 3 linked to statue noose, suspends Ole Miss chapter.
* Where the money goes: what $60,000 tuition at Duke buys you.
* The Definitive Guide to Never Watching Woody Allen Again.
* Pedophiles Are Still Tearing Reddit Apart.
* The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks’ Most Devious Scam Yet.
* The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy will launch in 2015.
* Always worth relinking: StrikeDebt’s Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual.
* On most policy questions of any importance, there are enough academics doing work to generate far more policy ideas than can seriously considered by our political system. When it comes to systemic risk, we have all the ideas we need–size caps or higher capital requirements–and we have academics behind both of those. The rest is politics. What we really need is for the people with the big megaphones to be smarter about the ideas that they cover.
* Milwaukee’s childhood lead poisoning prevention program running out of money. Income inequality grew rapidly in Milwaukee, study finds.
* Actually, climate trolls, January ended up being the fourth-warmest on record.
* EPA moves to toughen pesticide safety standards for the first time in 20 years.
* Scientists are appalled at Nicaragua’s plan to build a massive canal.
* South Carolina Legislators To Punish College For Assigning Gay-Themed Fun Home Comic To Freshmen.
* A sequel film for Farscape is in the early phases of development.
* NBC officially giving up, bringing back Heroes.
* How wrong is your time zone?
* Presenting the lowest possible score in Super Mario Brothers.
* The Amtrak Writers Fellowship.
* And now they’re saying the Voynich Manuscript might not be a hoax after all. Oh, I hope so.
All the Midweek Links
* CFP: The Problem of Contingency in Higher Education. CFP: Anthropocene Feminism at the Center for 21st Century Studies.
* By now my students were getting a bit restless. The confidence with which they had gone into this testing situation was beginning to dispel. Just a bit. There were still 102 questions left to answer.
* Exclusive Gyms For Members Of Congress Deemed ‘Essential,’ Remain Open During Shutdown. Amtrak Is in Trouble, But Congress Won’t Care. Government shutdown ends North Carolina WIC benefits. Social Security Warns Benefits Could Get Cut. DC Can’t Spend. Here’s how it’ll mess up higher ed (including freezing student loans). Secession by other means. Back Door Secession. Avenging the surrender of the South.
* The horror: New faculty positions versus new PhDs.
* Former Graduate Student Collects Placement Data He Wishes He’d Had.
* (Another) Intern Couldn’t Sue For Sexual Harassment In New York Because She Wasn’t Paid.
* A recent report shows that graduate students generate nearly a third of all education debt.
* Pay It Forward is a bad idea that doesn’t seem to make sense even in its own terms.
* “Exploitation should not be a rite of passage.”
* Using survey data collected from PhD students in five academic disciplines across eight public U.S. universities, the authors compare represented and non-represented graduate student employees in terms of faculty–student relations, academic freedom, and pay. Unionization does not have the presumed negative effect on student outcomes, and in some cases has a positive effect. Union-represented graduate student employees report higher levels of personal and professional support, unionized graduate student employees fare better on pay, and unionized and nonunionized students report similar perceptions of academic freedom. These findings suggest that potential harm to faculty–student relationships and academic freedom should not continue to serve as bases for the denial of collective bargaining rights to graduate student employees.
* How to Kill a Zombie: Strategizing the End of Neoliberalism.
* How Investors Lose 89 Percent of Gains from Futures Funds.
High fees and black boxes are just part of the story. Some funds also allow their managers to make undisclosed side bets by trading ahead of or opposite to the fund’s trades.
Chicago-based Grant Park Futures Fund LP, which is marketed by Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), says on page 90 of a 180-page, April 2013 prospectus that David Kavanagh, president of the $660.9 million fund’s general partner, may place such personal trades. “Mr. Kavanagh may even be the other party to a trade entered into by Grant Park,” it says.
* Adam Kotsko’s Contribution to the Critique of White Dudes.
* Rebecca Solnit, The Age of Inhuman Scale.
* Cropped Out: Environmental History Through a Car Window.
* Vulture has an excerpt from Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection.
* Sports Illustrated has an excerpt from League of Denial, on the NFL’s concussion denialism. You can also watch the Frontline documentary here.
* Soviet board-games, 1920-1938.
* In the days of the Soviet Union, the country boasted that all its citizens shared the wealth equally, but a new report has found that a mere 20 years after the end of Communism, wealth disparity has soared with 35% of the country’s entire wealth now in the hands of just 110 people.
* Within 35 years, even a cold year will be warmer than the hottest year on record, according to research published in Nature on Wednesday. The L.A. Times will no longer publish letters from climate cranks.
* But the kids are all right: Arin Andrews and Katie Hill, Transgender Teenage Couple, Transition Together.
World’s Dumbest Idea
Chuck Schumer wants a ‘no-ride’ list for trains. Exactly what problem is this meant to solve?
All Airport Security, All the Time
* I feel a little bad about calling Haisong Jiang a “douchebag with impulse control issues” now that he has a name and a story.
* The headline reads, “Carville: Airport scanners can ‘measure my penis’.” I think that says it all.
* ‘Mind-reading systems could change air security.’ They sure could!
* The rich are different from you and me.
* And Amtrak’s not doing so great either.
If Only It Ran on Time
Ron Paul says Amtrak is fascist. It doesn’t even run on time!
Gerry Canavan 